Volume 2 (2015): Issue 1 (October 2015)
Mediatized Cultural Activism

This article is a conversation between Birgitte Lesanner and Camilla Møhring Reestorff, who have a shared interest in mediatized activism, participation, and social change. The conversation focuses on the mediatized activist practices that Greenpeace engaged in in their Save the Arctic campaign and their efforts to end the collaboration between Lego and Shell through the campaign LEGO: Everything is NOT awesome (Greenpeace, 2014). Our discussion starts with the concept of mediatization and how Greenpeace accommodates media logics and fosters online spreadability. We focus on the importance of popular culture in creating recognizability as well as the utilization of humor and culture jamming. The conversation then explores the relation between these mediatized practices and mobilization and tackles questions of activist participation – from online clicktivism to offline campaign at oil drilling sites. Wrapping up, the conversation dives into the consequences of the campaign and asks what kind of sustainable future Greenpeace envisions.

The Anthropocene offers us an opportunity to be affected by different temporalities and participate in a newly constituted collective. This paper examines select examples of actual and fictional reality TV programs in which ordinary people wrestle with concerns that are explicitly not those of the neoliberal capitalist imaginary, but are attuned to the task of changing everyday embodied practices of surviving well, distributing wealth, encountering, connecting, and sharing with others. I am concerned with how to take these sparks of an emerging and different common sense and fan them into widespread collective action that reshapes the way we live on this planet. I draw on four inspirational threads of thinking to consider what a politics of participation might be in the Anthropocene: Michael Hardt’s conception of a militant biopolitics, the ideas of Michel Callon and John Law about qualculation, William Connolly’s insights into affective registers that resonate with the ‘sweetness of life’, and J.K. Gibson-Graham’s diverse economy (re)framing. I argue for the need to support experiments with living in new ways by differentiating our economic world and opening up the economy as a site of ethical practice that acknowledges being-in-common with human and earth others.

During Turkey’s Gezi Park Protests in the summer of 2013, millions of people became connected as fellow protesters. In the early days of the Gezi movement, the increase in participatory activism through social media made visible the police brutality exercised in the last days of May 2013 against a small group of environmentalists who were protecting Gezi Park from being demolished in order to build a shopping mall. Throughout Turkey’s political history, there has been no other example of this kind of spontaneous mass movement resisting the state apparatus with the large participation of diverse groups and self-convened protesters, without any dominant ideological appeal or leader affiliation. In this article, I will analyze the ways in which these patterns of contradictory interactions formed, evaluated, or triggered various types of social relationships, by critically examining the content of viral images, memes, and widely shared posts by Gezi protesters on social media. In the absence of internal cohesion or an ideological and organizational agenda, I argue that widely shared viral images, memes, and text messages provided the content to collaboratively construct and publicly frame the autonomous logic of the “Gezi spirit” by the Gezi protesters. I aim to analyze this new understanding of collective identity in autonomous logic processed through social media as a being-with (mit-sein), rather than a fusion of the individual to an enigmatic we-ness in order to represent “I”. I claim that this autonomous collectivity is driven by fluidarity as a public experience of the self in relation to the other without intermediary apparatuses and hence can be conceptualized as having built a new sociality.

This paper analyses the Je suis Charlie movement as an affective assemblage. It looks at digital network activism around the Charlie Hebdo shootings in the perspective of the Deleuzian concepts of assemblage and event. The essay argues that new participatory activism can be understood in two ways: as a (territorialised) ‘assemblage’ (after Delanda, 2006) and as a constellation of ‘things’ into what Thrift (2007) calls a ‘transient structure’ (Salovaara 2014). Drawing from assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari 1996; DeLanda 2006), the essay explores concrete and virtual sides of a media assemblage as event spaces. Empirically, the analysis explores the assemblage, as well as related memes, hashtags and narratives around #Je suis Charlie activism.

In this paper we analyse the impact of the mediatised strategy of the global protest group Femen. In addition to the concept of mediatisation, we employ the concept of counterpublics and find that Femen have limited impact in the Arab world due to a lack of embedment in local communities. We show how mediatisation of protest can hamper the dual function of counterpublic discourse and action. By focusing primarily outwardly and adopting dominant media logics (outwardly focused, interpublic discourse), Femen’s protest strategies result in a sensational and top-down message. This is not embedded in a conversation with local communities (the inwardly focused intrapublic function of counterpublic discourse) and as such results in much resistance in the Arab world. Moving beyond an analysis of Femen’s message to include local Arab responses, our analysis allows us insight into the lived experiences of mediatised protest, which suggest that Femen’s antagonistic actions foster alienation rather than empowerment.

This paper presents a case study of the German neo-fascist network The Immortals (Die Unsterblichen) who in 2011 performed a flash-mob, which was disseminated on YouTube for the so-called “Become Immortal” campaign. The street protest was designed for and adapted to the specific characteristics of online activism. It is a good example of how new contentious action repertoires in which online and street activism intertwine have also spread to extreme right groups. Despite its neo-fascist and extreme right content, the “Become Immortal” campaign serves as an illustrative case for the study of mediated and mediatized activism.

In order to analyze the protest form, the visual aesthetics and the discourse of The Immortals, the paper mobilizes three concepts from media and communication studies: media practice, mediation, and mediatization. It will be argued that the current transformation and modernization processes of the extreme right can be conceptualized and understood through the lens of these three concepts.

This article studies the Norwegian Students and Academics’ International Assistance Fund’s (SAIH) hoax advocacy campaign, Radi-Aid. The paper distinguishes between advocacy campaigns that are designed as fund-raising and awareness campaigns targeted at changing political attitudes towards humanitarianism. The article argues that Radi-Aid is a mediatized activist awareness campaign that negotiates participatory development ethics. The focus is thus on Radi-Aid’s engagement in an ethics that explores the functionality of celebrities and lifestyle posthumanitarianism and the participation of local communities. While posthumanitarianism might simply be dismissed, for instance, through notions of low engagement participation such as clicktivism and lifestyle activism, the article argues that Radi-Aid is itself a form of posthumanitarianism. This posthumanitarianism is crucial because it works as a form of détournement that simultaneously shames participants and makes existent humanitarian communities present to one another and turns them into political collectives. As such, Radi-Aid can be interpreted as a reconfiguration of posthumanitarianism that offers the shamed a remedy by means of the participatory development ethics.

This article deals with the aesthetic mobilization of anonymity in Argentine activist practices. Focusing on the specific intervention of El Siluetazo, the public drawing and placarding of nameless silhouettes during the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, anonymity will be explored as instigating an affective politics of sensation. Different from the human rights discourse on disappearance, which is concerned with politics of identification of the disappeared and the repressors, anonymity offers forms of affective relaying beyond identity. The logic of identity will be discussed in relation to a “distribution of the sensible” that takes aesthetics of sense perception as the target of control (Rancière, 2004). Through investigating the silhouettes not as a universal signifier of disappearance but as an aesthetic expression potentially moving across space and time, I will unfold a media ecological conception of activist practices and their capacities of activating transtemporal forms of resistance.